Lewa Downs on the eastern edge of Laikipia is home to the Craig family and to one of the great success stories of Kenyan wildlife conservation, the Rhinoceros breeding programme. Wilderness Trails is the private home of Will and Emma Craig, and it's here that most visitors to Lewa stay.

Wilderness Trails is somewhat rough around the edges and many of the rooms feel quite tired and in need of a bit of TLC.

Don't expect too much “safari style” at Wilderness Trails - but it has a certain old Kenya charm to it. Wilderness Trails is an old ranch house, and, as with many of the Kenyan bush homes, much of its appeal is in the people who own and run this place. Most people come to Wilderness Trails to see Lewa's Rhinos, but it's also somewhere you'll find some quite interesting micro-industry - a furniture factory that uses dead wood collected from the ranch to make reproduction furniture, an organic vegetable plot that produces all the food for the house, and even talk of growing a bio-diesel crop in a self sufficiency drive. This element is a fun, if low key backdrop to the main event at Lewa.

Lewa is unlike much of Laikipia, which is known for the wildness of its harsh rocky country.

This is an area of soft rolling volcanic hills and wide lush plains set in the shadow of Mt Kenya whose rocky peaks are clearly visible on a fine day. The Lewa River runs through the game rich plains, its banks lined with stands of large mature Yellow fever acacia trees. Apart from the terrain, the other significant contrast you notice as soon as you arrive at Lewa, is that unlike most of Laikipia, electric fences are much in evidence here. Lewa is an area of 65,000 acres, entirely surrounded by electric fencing, with a single gap of nine metres in the north to allow a steady diffusion of game in and out of the area. There are plans for the fences between Lewa and Borana to come down in the next year or so.

To make sense of the fences at Lewa, you need to understand the main propose of Lewa.

This isn't simply a fenced safari park in which tourists are trundled around to see the animals, although compared to some places, it can feel like this at times. Lewa is home to one of the most successful breeding programs for endangered species in Africa. Best known of these is the Rhino breeding program; there are some 40 black rhino, indigenous to this area, and 35 white rhinos, a species from southern Africa. Lewa also holds over 25 percent of the worlds population of the Grevy's Zebra and a small population of Sitatunga, originally from the Saiwa Swamp in western Kenya, are breeding here.

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Lewa Wilderness Trails, Laikipia Plateau

Wilderness Trails is somewhat rough around the edges and many of the rooms feel quite tired and in need of a bit of TLC.

Lewa is unlike much of Laikipia, which is known for the wildness of its harsh rocky country.

To make sense of the fences at Lewa, you need to understand the main propose of Lewa.

Sabuk

Rekero Kidogo

Offbeat Camp

Mwagusi Safari Camp

Selous Safari Camp

Matemwe Bungalows


Lewa Wilderness Trails, Laikipia Plateau home > safari camps > lewa wilderness trails	+44 (0)1747 898104 about us contact us